Understanding Your Inner World of Parts: How IFS Helps You Heal
- Brittney Green
- Apr 30
- 4 min read
Have you ever felt like different parts of you are at odds with each other, like you were being pulled in different directions? Maybe one part of you wanted rest, but another was pushing you to keep working. Or perhaps you wanted to set a boundary, yet another part feared disappointing others. This inner conflict is completely natural—it’s how our minds work.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy offers a powerful way to understand and offer healing to these different “parts” of ourselves. In IFS, we recognise that everyone has an “inner world” made up of various parts, each with its own role and voice. Even if it doesn’t feel like it, these parts are working hard to protect us. By learning about ourselves through curiosity, we are able to build relationship, and, ultimately, bring more harmony to our inner world.
What Are “Parts” in IFS?
Think of your mind as a cast of characters, each with its own role in keeping you safe and functioning. In IFS, these parts tend to fall into three main categories:
Exiles: These parts hold onto deep pain, shame, or trauma. If your emotions are too big to handle at the time, they get pushed out of your awareness. The exile is the part that holds these emotions and memories, tucked away, hidden from view.
Protectors: These parts work overtime to prevent you from feeling the pain of your exiles.
Managers work proactively to try to keep everything under control, steering you away from any potential danger. They can show up as perfectionists, people-pleasers, workaholics, and hypervigilance.
Firefighters jump into action when pain sneaks through the cracks. They might push you toward emotional numbing, impulsive decisions, or distraction techniques like binge-watching, overeating, or shutting down.
These parts aren’t trying to make your life harder. Exiles need help unburdening their pains. Protectors need to know that it is safe to try a new strategy. So how can we achieve this?
The Self: Your Built-In Healing Energy
Beneath all these parts, you have something even more powerful—your Self. In IFS, Self is the calm, compassionate, and wise presence we all have at our core. It’s the part of you that can lead with understanding instead of reacting out of fear.
Self-energy shows up through what are called “the 8 C’s”:
Calm, Curiosity, Clarity, Compassion, Confidence, Courage, Creativity, and Connectedness
For many, accessing Self can be a profound and healing experience—but it’s not always easy. Some people find that their Self energy feels distant, or even completely inaccessible. Especially if you’ve experienced childhood or complex trauma, your system may have felt it needed to protect you by pushing Self into the background. Some parts may even believe Self was to blame for past hurts or that Self wasn’t strong enough to protect you. In these cases, reconnecting with Self can take time, patience, and gentle persistence.
If your protectors have been leading your system without Self for some time, it makes sense if your parts may not automatically relax when Self-energy appears. After all, they’ve been doing their jobs for a long time, and change—even good change—can feel like a scary risk. But here’s the thing: trust can be built. Just like in any other relationship, when our parts see Self showing up with consistent compassion and patience, they begin to soften. Over time, parts become more and more willing to step back, making space for healing, balance, and change with greater ease.
Why Do Parts Get Stuck? (Hint: Trauma Plays a Big Role)
If you’ve experienced trauma—especially in childhood—your parts may have taken on extreme roles in order to protect you. When painful experiences aren’t processed, exiles stay exiled, and protectors often have little sense of how much time may have passed, or how much situations have changed.
For example, a manager might keep you hyper-aware of other people’s emotions, scanning for any sign of rejection or conflict. A firefighter might urge you to zone out or engage in self-soothing behaviors whenever emotions feel too intense. Perhaps both of these were responses to childhood neglect. If that experience hasn’t been fully processed, there might still be a part of you struggling with the pain of that neglect. In this context, these protectors make sense—they started out as real survival strategies. However, unbeknownst to these parts, you may now be an adult in a safe environment, in which these automatic responses aren’t keeping you safe—they’re keeping you from living the life you truly want.
How IFS Can Help You Heal
IFS Therapy provides a framework to connect with and heal these parts. Here’s a rough overview of how the process unfolds:
Getting to Know Your Parts: Instead of battling against your inner critics or maladaptive coping mechanism, what if you got curious? The first stage of IFS is about finding that curiosity to understand “What is this part trying to protect me from?”
Building Trust: When you meet your parts with compassion instead of judgment, they start to soften. They realise you’re listening. Consider when you’ve met a new person: how would you feel if they criticized your viewpoint without hearing you out? How would you feel if they took the time to listen and made an effort to help you get what you want (not what they want)?
Unburdening Old Wounds: Once a protector trusts you, it will allow you access to the exile it is protecting you from. In working with the exile, we are able to help this part finally release the painful emotions or beliefs it’s been carrying (sometimes for years or decades).
Living with More Self-Leadership: As protectors relax and exiles heal, you feel more calm, confident, and free to live as your true self.
Ready to Explore Your Inner World?
Healing starts with curiosity. What if, instead of fighting your inner world, you could learn to listen with curiosity and lead with compassion? If you’re ready to explore IFS therapy and build a deeper connection with yourself, I’d love to support you. Schedule a free consultation today, and let’s begin getting to know your inner world.
